Cyberpunk Catch-All

WizardM0de wrote:

I just finished my first mission and was immediately presented with an assortment of things all popping off at the same time without understanding their why, their priority, etc. I just don't have that connection to my character yet, I don't know enough yet, to realize how it all fits.

The funny thing is, they've improved that aspect of the game massively from the way it was when it was first released. It was a lot more disorganized before.

As for Jackie:

Spoiler:

For me, learning about his relationship with Misty and attending his funeral were really solid story beats that drove my investment in the world. His death hurt, but it was also pretty heavily telegraphed. The soul of the game though is really Silverhand and Silverhand is an epically awful human being. How you feel about the game probably depends a lot on how you feel about the company of terrible and fascinating monsters.

I'll just put out a counterpoint and say, on PC, I played through the game on release and enjoyed it a ton. Started a replay on 1.31 just before 1.5 came out and picking different paths and also enjoying the hell out of it.

After spending a good number of hours back inside of this game over the weekend I think this is basically what I was hoping for in 1.0 or so. I still love just wandering around Night City. There are some story beats that are really good. The part that polq37 mention. The part in Clouds with the Doll that has been programmed by the AI or whatever to talk you through your fear of your death. There are a lot of disconnected parts of this game that are very good, but anything that pulls you away from the main mission and story just feel out of place. Like maybe we can wait until we aren't slowly being killed by a damaged chip in our brain before we participate in street racing. Also the first time I played I did the Nomad and this time I did the Street Kid and I really wish there was more to these beginnings than there is.

Mildly disappointed that the SaveGame Editor for this doesn't work anymore. Once I play through a game legit once, I kinda wanna just dick around and cheat and have fun in any further playthroughs. Wish they'd added in a console so I could just make V even more violent Ares if I wanted to.

Another patch?

I hope they'd add it in! Hell, I'll happily pay $5 for it. Just lemme tear-ass around and break the game. I don't even want to go in and edit like, important mission triggers or other stuff. Just let me turn all my stats up to a kajillion and fart bullets.

Also the first time I played I did the Nomad and this time I did the Street Kid and I really wish there was more to these beginnings than there is.

This was another gripe for me. The beginnings are mostly flavor, but don't really affect the game as much as I wish they did.

Spoiler:

Nomad and Corpo in particular. The Nomad beginning should cause you to have an entirely different experience with the Aldecaldos and Panam, at least initially, while the Corpo beginning should make your and Johnny's relationship WAY more hostile initially, given that he has a homicidal bias against Arasaka and you LITERALLY were one of their higher-up covert soldiers.

So that "The They Won't Go When I Go" mission...

Found an interesting counterpoint to all the bad press this game got on release.

I started reading the SomethingAwful thread and the majority of goons there were absolutely loving it.

Discovered that slicing up low level gangers with a katana is pretty fun.

For me, this latest version of the game is really scratching that mid-school (all those games from Fallout 3 to the Witcher 3, roughly 2005 to 2015) rpg itch.

It feels like the kind of game that used to be a big deal and hasn't really been successfully made in a while.

strangederby wrote:

Found an interesting counterpoint to all the bad press this game got on release.

I started reading the SomethingAwful thread and the majority of goons there were absolutely loving it.

There's a portion of us here that have as well...

ranalin wrote:
strangederby wrote:

Found an interesting counterpoint to all the bad press this game got on release.

I started reading the SomethingAwful thread and the majority of goons there were absolutely loving it.

There's a portion of us here that have as well...

I've not been playing for long but I too am loving it.

Prederick wrote:

A little over halfway through my second playthrough, and this isn't a criticism of Cyberpunk, as much as it is of romance in games in general:

Spoiler:

So, I quite enjoyed V's romance with Judy. I haven't seen or played through the one Male V gets with Panam, but the one with Judy felt warm and surprisingly nice (I'd argue that the sex scene felt surprisingly not-male-gaze-y, but I'd be happy to be corrected).

But the thing that disappointed me, actually, was that we didn't get to spend enough time living in that relationship. And that's not just a Cyberpunk thing, that's most games, which treat the first time you bang your paramour as the last meaningful moment of a romance, gameplay-wise.

And I get why, and I'm certainly not asking for a game to try and represent all the ins and outs of being in a long-term relationship yet, but I know when I was playing CP, I found myself wishing I could've explored more of the budding of V and Judy's relationship.

I don't think it's in any way controversial to say that very few lasting relationships peak with the first time you have sex. And I was left a bit disappointed that after that, V & Judy's relationship amounts ultimately to a few text messages. Hell, even at the end (assuming you take the "Let the Aldecaldos Help You" method and choose not to cross into the veil with Alt) you get a nice little message from Judy about how she's finally happy, but that's it, and I wanted to spend a little bit more time inside of that romance, of taking it from "we f*cked that one time" to "I genuinely care about you and want you in my life."

Basically, I'd like games to stop treating banging your crush as the be-all/end-all of a romance plot, and start considering that the first time you have sex is a landmark in a relationship, but that there's so much more around that to explore.

Again, I don't need a whole RomCom out of it, but like, maybe another 1-3 side missions and some dialogue? Just something to let it breathe and deepen, and to stop treating "the first time we f*cked" as little more than an achievement to be unlocked.

More on this, which I'll hide in spoilers again:

Spoiler:

Got recommended a YT video showing some of the expansion to the romances from the patch, and they've definitely addressed some of my problems. And to be fair, it's much, much better now. I still wish they'd gone a little bit deeper and let us luxuriate in it a little bit more, but to be fair, the game doesn't go that much deeper with anyone other than Johnny.

I still think there's more meat left on the bone that should've been addressed. In Judy's case, there absolutely should be a scene where you tell her you're going on a suicide mission into Arasaka (if you choose that), to probably die trying to avoid your death that they could've done so much with.

Like, seriously, Judy's entire thing is that she used to love Evelyn, Evelyn ends up dead, then she falls in love with you, except you are literally dying and decide to go on a one-in-a-million mission to stay alive. The last person she loved is dead, and the new person she loves is highly likely to follow her almost immediately afterward!

I feel like the sheer amount of trauma Judy's experienced by that point should allow her to have a bit more of an... intense moment with you when you tell her your plan (assuming you're doing the suicide mission).

That said, from what I saw, it's still a lot better. All of em' are a lot better. CDPR did a really good job with the romances in this, IMHO. But as I said in the original post, I really wish more games would stop treating romance as a "And then we f*cked [nude cutscene]" achievement to be gotten.

If games are art (and I think they are), I hope more of them can begin writing stories and characters like they're adults, and not like a 12-year-old boy's power fantasy.

EDIT: Also, if any Lady goodjers see this... uh...

...There's not a way in hell Judy's bra provides a lick of support, is there?

Anyway, I can't wait to play through it again.... once someone makes a new tool that lets me cheat my ass off if I want to.

strangederby wrote:

Found an interesting counterpoint to all the bad press this game got on release.

I started reading the SomethingAwful thread and the majority of goons there were absolutely loving it.

As I said a couple pages ago, I have a literal laundry list of complaints about this game.

And yet, I've played through it twice, am on my fourth run-through, and don't regret a moment of it and was having fun 99% of the time. It is a very, very good game with several glaring flaws.

Done. A word about the endings.

Spoiler:

Those were some premo downbeat endings. I went full corpo and ended up in space loosing my mind which was fasinating. Restarted and did the Panam ending which was beautiful. I'm impressed that the devs had the courage to not give any happy ever after solutions.

Going to play Elex 2 now but I'm going to dip back in for more cyberpunk at some point.

strangederby wrote:

Done. A word about the endings.

Spoiler:

Those were some premo downbeat endings. I went full corpo and ended up in space loosing my mind which was fasinating. Restarted and did the Panam ending which was beautiful. I'm impressed that the devs had the courage to not give any happy ever after solutions.

Not really courage as much as they're not American devs.

ranalin wrote:
strangederby wrote:

Done. A word about the endings.

Spoiler:

Those were some premo downbeat endings. I went full corpo and ended up in space loosing my mind which was fasinating. Restarted and did the Panam ending which was beautiful. I'm impressed that the devs had the courage to not give any happy ever after solutions.

Not really courage as much as they're not American devs.

Ok

Ok this peaked my interest. As a non American can you expand on that?

I am frustrated by the absence of any decent headwear in this game. All of the hats are deeply uncool.

strangederby wrote:
ranalin wrote:
strangederby wrote:

Done. A word about the endings.

Spoiler:

Those were some premo downbeat endings. I went full corpo and ended up in space loosing my mind which was fasinating. Restarted and did the Panam ending which was beautiful. I'm impressed that the devs had the courage to not give any happy ever after solutions.

Not really courage as much as they're not American devs.

Ok

Ok this peaked my interest. As a non American can you expand on that?

American media, primarily Hollywood, pretty much demands everything to end on a happy note because it sells better. There's a few exceptions here and there but they're very much in the minority.

American media, primarily Hollywood, pretty much demands everything to end on a happy note because it sells better. There's a few exceptions here and there but they're very much in the minority.

Absolutely, though movies like The Road are in that minority camp.

Hopefully we get more non-happy, arguably more realistic, movies that take a page out of those books. Perhaps not as bleak as the aforementioned movie.

Witcher 3 had a bleak ending pathway too.

Brownypoints wrote:

Witcher 3 had a bleak ending pathway too.

It was amazing! Just heart-wrenchingly, meaningfully awful.

Yeah, I got the bleak pathway on my first try.

Even my preferred ending, which is a fairly "Happy" one is still at best bittersweet, which I think fits the quite well.

I will admit though, I was heated when...

Spoiler:

I got the initial "Run Away Wtih the Aldecaldos" ending and it was clear that V was still probably going to die. I've been trained by decades of Western games to expect that, y'know, you press all the right buttons and you beat all the right baddies and you get the "Good" ending. And here's this ending, which is like "V's probably going to die though. You might find a miracle, but that's a real longshot."

So I was initially peeved, until I took a minute and thought about it and realized it fit the game and, more especially, the genre quite well. Cyberpunk isn't a genre particularly known for "And all the badguys died and everyone lived happily ever after" endngs.

In retrospect, I've come to quite enjoy that V did get some closure in that ending, even if she was still going to die fairly soon afterwards.

I am very pro-"Be brave enough to have endings that aren't 100% happy for everyone across the board sometimes," so I like what they did.

I thought all the endings were appropriate, depending on how you played. Like I think when people were really upset it's because it clashed with their specific run/play style, not that they didn't work for the world itself.

I just installed mods for the first time, nothing fancy, just quality of life stuff.

There's a mod that unlocks ALL appearance features in the mirror, for example. And even lets you save your V as a preset! That's something I've wanted in the vanilla game for awhile. Even when I want to try a new build/run, I got attached to my character's look.

Another one hides duplicate shards you've already read/picked up. Or skips the intro videos. Stuff like that.

There's a mod that enables an apparently existing (but not live in the official release) ability to hide your hat. In the inventory screen there's eyeballs next to equipment and you toggle it off to hide it.

I want to check out more of 1.5 before I install anything that might change gameplay, like the Netrunner enhanced mod.

I will definitely replay the whole things with mods and dive deep into that whole rabbit hole but i'll wait until the DLC/expansions have been released and rate of patches have slowed down.

Had my biggest disappointment yet with this game yesterday. Was wandering around Pacifica after finishing a quest in that area and decided to go check out the roller coaster near the GIM. There is a passenger car on the track and it has one of those magnifying glass icons over it so I had a brief moment of thinking you could ride it. Sadly nope. Worst game ever /s

Rykin wrote:

There is a passenger car on the track and it has one of those magnifying glass icons over it so I had a brief moment of thinking you could ride it. Sadly nope. Worst game ever /s

... I got to ride it. IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/cloudcast/ABmpZs5EtvDvCzf8XHPvhfn-iBRq48_zbfj6F6AkKxhxoOEOjmAj32iTh5uvrw=w11520-h6480-rw-no-v1-nu)

If you read the message in the scan it gives you a hint for how to get it working.

Spoiler:

There's a control panel you need to fix at one end of the platform. You hop down, repair it, then the rollercoaster works.

ccoates wrote:

If you read the message in the scan it gives you a hint for how to get it working.

Spoiler:

There's a control panel you need to fix at one end of the platform. You hop down, repair it, then the rollercoaster works.

Damn I saw that and looked around but gave up after a few minutes of looking.

They seem to be going back to the goose that laid the golden egg.

IMAGE(https://external-preview.redd.it/lQG-LqRH-36P_2HjGduhwp7WqQC2E9Sy8IZlKTs2WO0.png?auto=webp&s=acb661166654b67ad5061e0dfc183e18257c07c7)

So in my 1.5 run it's been a lot harder to gain levels.

I don't think that's a bad thing, however. They've redone how gigs are added to the map, they're not just ALL available from the get-go. You seem to get them doled out at a more reasonable pace as you level up.

Before, since everything was just available from the start, I knew which quests involved little to no combat, so I could rack up a lot of exp very quickly by hitting those first even as a netrunner with 3 body. It also means you can't immediately run to that quest where you can get discounted cyberware.

Crafting is still excellent for generating what is essentially infinite money. But given how many people on the Cyberpunk Discord seem to think crafting is worthless, maybe that's not a big deal. Personally it's potentially my favorite stat/skill tree.

Having less garbage items in the world is nice, too. Also, now that jewelry is its own category, the scrapper perk is useful because it won't recycle those items (although the value of jewelry was nerfed, too.)

Food is still a pain to manage because they disabled the ability to dismantle it with essentially the first patch (people were buying sodas and dismantling them for an infinite money loop.) But now there's no bulk method to deal with food items so they clutter your inventory eventually. You can't even bulk sell them like you can junk.

The rebalance of clothing is working well, I think. Armor values are drastically lower, so the traits/mods clothes have matter a lot more. I've kitted myself out with an entire wardrobe that boosts my damage against medium and high threat targets, for example.

The loot itself seems more balanced and varied than before, but I've got not actual concrete data on that, it's not like I'm spreadsheeting my loot. But I find myself swapping weapons and clothes more, not in a "this is the exact same gun but with 10 more DPS" or "this is the same shirt but with 10 more armor" way, but in a this is a different weapon/outfit but maybe I'll try it out way. I just remembered having an infinite supply of Unity pistols before, essentially. But I've had multiple revolvers, pistols, and even just picked up a Quasar.

I still think athletics and engineering should be adjusted. Every other skill is a lot easier to level up, and not just easier... natural. Leveling up athletics consistently without bunny hopping everywhere or using the berserk exploit (which they apparently nerfed) is basically impossible. And shooting through walls or grenades being the only way to level up engineering is silly. It should be the use of any tech item, like any other weapon skill. Otherwise you just end up throwing 100 grenades in every fight instead of balancing it out like other skills, because that's a lot more consistent.

Enjoying all the changes so far, but I'm only level 8 and haven't done the Heist yet, so still early days.

Easiest way to level up Engineering that I have found is to physically disable landmines not quickhack them (also get pretty good exp for disabling cameras which can still be done after quickhacking them for xp in both trees). There is a mission with River that takes you out to a farm that has landmines everywhere and each one you disable gets you like 200 Engineering XP. There is also a job for Dakota that has you retrieve a car from the middle of a minefield and there are hundreds of mines out in that area.

I agree with ccoates about the food items. I wish it all just showed up in your inventory as Food or Drink or Alcohol instead of having like a 100 different Food items and 100 different drink items. It does add spice to the world when you find a cherry cola of brand x or diet cola of brand y or a cola of brand x49762z instead of just one single type of cola, but in the inventory it just creates a lot of clutter. Also wish they did something like Bethesda games when selling multiple items. In those games it doesn't bring up the sell multiple items interface unless you have over a certain threshold of items so if you have 3 of an item you can just tap sell three times quickly to sell them all because that is faster than pulling up the sell multiple items interface but if you have 4 or more of the items then it shows you that interface. In this if you have 2 of an item you get the interface and it makes it take about 5x longer to sell 2 of an item than it takes to sell 1 of an item and also requires you to switch to the right stick to control the number of items sold and then press a different button than what just selling 1 items uses on consoles. This could also be solved by creating a Sell Stack button (on Xbox I don't believe that Y is used in the buying/selling menus for instance).

I think they need to readjust some of the Iconic stuff especially the Iconic outfits. I went and hunted some of them down and have random green items that have 60-100 more armor than some of them even when upgraded as high as I can upgrade them. I always hate when stats are tied to appearance items in games like this so they could really use a transmog system. When I was first playing the game after launch I was able to put together a pretty good look for a while until the upgrade component costs got astronomical, but at least then the upgraded stuff was the same tier as the random drops. This time through the dumbest looking random drops are way better than anything I can get through crafting or upgrading even legendary and iconic stuff. I am sure my V is getting taken really seriously running around with a green floppy bunny ear hat, funky welder goggles, a dress shirt with a bow tie, pink hot pants, and a basic pair of kicks (the only part of that combination of clothes I liked). They hyped up the fashion so much in the pre-release videos, but in the end if you want good stats you seem to be stuck just using whatever random thing drops.

Also the Mantis Blades are pretty low damage compared to high level katanas, but the gorilla arms are almost a must have for the street fights anyway so there isn't much point to going mantis blade other than the cool factor. I do wish I had had the mantis blades (and better subdermal armor) for the mission where you lose all your stuff and have to fight scavs in your birthday suit with no weapons though